(S)Tree(t) of (Cro)cod(il)es. Jonathan Safran Foer „okalecza” Brunona Schulza

This article deals with Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (2010), a die-cut novel based on the English-language edition of Bruno Schulz’s story collection Sklepy cynamonowe. In general terms, Foer’s Schulz-inspired artistic project can be linked to a wide variety of literary and artistic techniques: constrained writing, literary cut-up, erasure poetry, iconic typography and experimental book printing, … Remarkably, unlike most other authors of so-called Schulz-derived literature, Foer refrains from thematizing Schulz’s tragic life. Instead, the author of Tree of Codes creates an artifact that displays various Schulzian traits (defectivity, autoreferentiality, hybridity, …). While, on the one hand, Foer’s partial destruction of the Schulzian text might be seen as a reference to the artist’s fate during the Holocaust, the die-cut technique reinforces, on the other hand, the reader’s awareness of his own reading strategies and his crucial part in the construction of meaning. As such, what seems to link both Foer’s and Schulz’s artistic projects is their correspondence with a “transgenre” of literature that the Polish artist Zenon Fajfer has called “liberature”.status: publishe